Conrad Leiva, vice president for product strategy and alliance at iBASEt and chair of the smart manufacturing working group at MESA International, speaks with Smart Manufacturing magazine Editor in Chief Brett Brune.
Mazak Corp. (Florence, KY) continues its steady advance toward the complete factory digitization of all its manufacturing operations with the recent transformation of its Oguchi, Japan, facility into yet another Mazak iSMART Factory.
Unplanned downtime and production loss due to equipment failure is one of the leading losses for manufacturers. Most shops perform maintenance on a fixed schedule or on failure. This means a machine will be maintained regardless of how often it is used and unexpected breakdowns will stop production.
Simulation tools are making it much easier for manufacturers to optimize their processes, visualizing the entire path of production from NC metalcutting simulations through 3D design and factory-floor imaging.
As more original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and job shops “warm up” to the idea of laser welding, many have turned their attention to four specific technologies.
It is not surprising that the aerospace and defense industry exists at a higher plane of manufacturing. The components and end products being assembled must endure intense forces and pressures, are expected to perform without failure, and even the slightest mistake comes with extreme safety risks.
Before the coronavirus pandemic upended normal life and essentially shut down commercial airliners, the aviation industry had a projected need for 40,000 new aircraft—planes, helicopters, air taxis, and unmanned aerial vehicles—in the next 20 years.
If you were to rebuild your manufacturing business today, would you build it in the same way, or would you shape it differently to address new challenges and future innovations?
Part 1 of this three-part series on the Connected Machine Shop ran in the July issue of Manufacturing Engineering.
If Industry 3.0 is identified by the computerization of factory floor processes to make them “smart,” then Industry 4.0 can be understood as the expansion of the idea to include all of the non-factory floor inputs required to produce a quality product and a successful enterprise.
